


run

by ruruka



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:22:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23635270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruruka/pseuds/ruruka
Summary: i fell for your magici tasted your skinand though this is tragicat least i found the end.
Relationships: Atem & Kaiba Seto, Atem/Kaiba Seto
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	run

**Author's Note:**

> if dsod were real i imagine this as a pre-dsod fic.

Atem in life liked to brand himself as cooperative, but Kaiba knows he never was. Kaiba knows he’d sooner have learned loss than compromise. 

In the hallways at school, Yuugi stood with his feet together and his hair in his eyes and never talked much to anybody that wasn’t a waste of space. He’d see him there or on the streets walking home, five foot nothing, absolutely nothing, but _some_ times, sometimes, Yuugi would be...everything, he’d have posture, he’d have a lingering curl of smoke in either eye, be ten times the man Kaiba’s ever known anyone else to be. That’s around where his teeth first sunk in. He’d know it were sooner, thousands of years so, could he be softened down to a point where he’s anything but solid silver. Could his aegis be shed. Could he breathe.

Kaiba has every feeling to sort out and then some, so he’s reasonable to stuff them all in their own manila folders and slam the drawer back shut, and there isn’t a key but if there were a key he’d snap it right at the neck. 

At his work desk, he wears smooth wool and the pain in his wrists. He’ll sit down on his bed tonight with his suit coat waiting on a dry clean, he’ll massage one hand in the other like he’s done his whole life, healed his own pains and mopped his own messes and licked his own wounds, his whole own life he’s been wholly his own. 

A night pulled from a random weekday he’ll be laying awake. He likes to sleep on his back when it’s knotted up top. Sometimes he sleeps on a side so his eyes may fall to the light beneath the door, and sometimes he sleeps on his back, like any night of the week, arms cold in their rest overtop himself. Cold. He looks to the ceiling for nothing, instead sees two faces, one in either eye; to his left is Yuugi- but it can’t even be so. It isn’t Yuugi he’s seeing with those tautened eyes and scorn, but he’s soft like Yuugi, thin like Yuugi, everything he was while hostage in this timeline. To the right, he sees the Atem he knows lives with no limitations, skin as golden brown as his whole dominion, toned, kempt, broad and merciless. The Pharaoh is an entirely separate lover to the world than The Other Yuugi ever was. The Other Yuugi never existed, between Kaiba’s own reluctance to see it and the afterlife that paints him as he was always meant to be, The Other Yuugi never existed. Kaiba lays on his back and he sees the one of them side by side, and as if as the single, limitless being they are, they say nothing, and it’s just about time that happened, for fuck’s sake, Kaiba thinks. 

“Do you think we’ll hear back from the Korean guy today?”

At his work desk. Right.

Blindingly hits sun upon the windows bordering behind him. Black suits are too macabre for a work day, but a dark navy color brings out the best in his irises, even further a loss of breath when he turns in his place and the summer lays just so across his face. Kaiba Seto never ceases to be beautiful. Crown to toe he is a machine, perfect, otherworldly. Sometimes he wonders of the latter’s certain truth.

“He’ll respond soon if he knows who he’s dealing with,” he murmurs back to the question dropped on Mokuba’s path through his office. Another Kaiba Land for Korea’s southern border would like itself to be in the works. Now that he’s got the time for it, ever since... _things_ stopped happening so often.

Kaiba never _had_ to be involved in any _thing_ beforehand. Something always seemed to have its blade edge resting underneath his chin, though, and he knows he’s right, he knows it, because he’d left the bunch of idiots all pulled together by the magnetism of Mutou Yuugi to their own devices just once and then received the news that the farthest winning streak in Duel Monsters history had been cut off by some nobody with a motorcycle and a meta Spell Card. So he kept closeby after that. To make sure Yuugi stayed on his goddamn toes. Before that...doesn’t matter.

On the nights he’s across the pond from sleeping, laying on his back, watching the pictureshow of foreign memories on his bedroom ceiling, it’s those nights Kaiba will allow himself to believe in what he knows may just be the boat to sail him right over that water; Kaiba lets his mind drift to who Atem ever thought he was, the spokesman of teamwork who’d in ease leave everyone he’s ever known behind his back. Kaiba thinks of Atem and _what_ he was more often than _who_ he was, and on occasion, too, he’ll have to wonder just _when_ he was. When Yuugi had a backbone. That was Atem. When Yuugi stood straight and looked Kaiba in the eye as he barked down on his every last sin. That was Atem. When Yuugi would sooner push his beating heart silent off the castle’s ledge than admit he’s the weakest link here. Fucking Atem. Things like that flick scowls onto Kaiba’s gnawed lips and make him think he’s missing the goddamn wrong person. 

Missing is too strong a word. Mostly he’s wondering how it’s possible to know someone so long without knowing them at all, and the very second he’s able to get a grip and think huh maybe this is someone this is someone maybe this is someone unique and different this isn’t the Yuugi I’ve been locked to at the heels- how quickly he can have the blood stolen from his lungs to be told, yes, he’s alive, and now, yes, he’s dead. 

If Kaiba were enough to deserve a goodbye, he might feel less like aiming a pistol at the dead Pharaoh’s pulse points. If he were enough. 

At his work desk, he might think Kaiba and Kaiba are two separate souls, too, the coherent Kaiba of the day who knows he’s absolutely everything a man could ever dream of wanting, and the Kaiba of late night who threads his fingers and wonders why he never even got a fucking goodbye. Not that anything so trivial matters. The Pharaoh was Yuugi for almost as long as he’d known him, and Yuugi’s still here, so go to him, stop brooding over a person he never knew and go smack his face a screaming red right now. Yuugi’s still here. He never left. Right.

Kaiba looks in the mirror less often than he may have before he stopped sleeping. When he passes by it, he’ll look, he’ll glance, see himself where the lamplight in the bathroom is orange and ruins his face, eyes choked in shadows and cheekbones two pallid angles. He’s beautiful in a miserable sort of way. And then he goes to bed. His back’s tight with pressure tonight. He’ll sleep on his side. 

When his eyes close, there’s a throbbing behind them that tastes of sickness. But Kaiba isn’t ill. He has everything he needs, which is A. himself and B. his brother, and on the mornings where the curtains bleed with sun like a snap of the fingers, C. his rotting brain that thrums with thoughts he can’t wring it of.

Maybe that’s the type of person he is. Maybe he’s obsessive, maybe he lays awake at night and dreams of meeting the Pharaoh on the other side of nowhere just to wrap his hands around his throat and feel him breathe because he’s obsessed with all that’s been taken from him. A clean defeat. That’s all he needs to get some rest. Yes, that’s it, he’s obsessed with what Atem stole from him, his victories, his record, crumpled up in his hands and left astray. If Kaiba could find him, he’d raise the Duel Disk on his arm and fan through his deck so fast the Pharaoh’s head would spin, and the Pharaoh and the Priest and the Paladin would fall to their knees and pray to know what all his new world can offer. Atem stole his pride, and tossed it away, and then he left. Kaiba doesn’t think Atem deserves to rest in the afterlife if he can’t rest in his own. 

At his work desk, he lays his face in his hands, and sleeps.

In bed, there aren’t candles despite the golden feel of warmth round the room, curtains closed, blankets luxurious. Kaiba thinks he feels his hands tremble. Kaiba thinks it must be cold. 

What’s he concluded, now- he’s obsessed with closure, a final match to decide him the winner once and for all. He’s obsessed with the one thing he can’t have, and it’s the very first time in his life he’s been told he can’t have something, which only digs the blade deeper til it’s scraping on bone and he knows he has to have it. Molars grit, he has to have it. Yuugi isn’t enough, Yuugi won’t ever satisfy this insatiable hole he shoveled out the center of Kaiba Seto and then left. Or. What? Yuugi isn’t it. Yuugi.

Kaiba doesn’t believe in magic, but Atem was dull enough to, so maybe if Atem can make magic he can make something happen. He could bring himself back into that body he had just long enough to lose it, and Kaiba can face him one last time without the intrusion of any other heart or gaze that could see him there, nobody else sharing the blood searing through Atem’s own body as they stand eye to eye; Kaiba wonders what that sort of flesh and blood would feel like beneath his hands. He thinks it might burn. He hopes it’d quiver. 

He knows he’s certainly chased his tail round long enough when he starts wondering what Atem would like about his expensive sheets, his cashmere, his satin. He’d see the ornate glass fixings on the shower handles and say nothing in particular, because he’s used to wealth and luxury, he’s buried in a hundred different types of jewels and metals but, look, the thermostat’s got thirteen settings, isn’t that something? He thinks if Atem were here, he’d have to keep the house hot all the time to accommodate his sunned soul, and Kaiba wouldn’t like that, Kaiba would grip him by the chin and push him down into those expensive sheets and tell him he’ll keep him plenty hot if he keeps behaving so brusquely as he knows he would. And the door would lock behind them. And the night would burn magnetic red. 

He knows he’s had enough when he starts thinking that way. Atem never loved him and that’s just as well because he never loved the fucking bastard right back. But- But maybe if he were good enough for a goodbye, it would’ve meant Atem did like him, that they had what Kaiba is sometimes sick enough to think they could. Atem was a king in his own time and Kaiba would make hotly sure he knew that the roles are reversed now, get on your knees, beg to your God, pity yourself the mindless Iscariot who’s gone and betrayed everyone who welcomed him into their lives. Atem was a king and Kaiba is one. Kaiba would place his boot on the back of Atem’s neck if he felt he weren’t bowing deeply enough, and he’d smirk at the sight of something so pathetic as an ageless Pharaoh groveling that way, and if Atem loved him the way he should have he’d know he deserved it. There’d be no questions. Not in Kaiba Seto’s kingdom of stained glass and hissing tongues. 

Coffee sets on his work desk. He glances up at the little sticky bit of sorrow in Mokuba’s silver eyes, but he’s smiling anyway, tells him, “I put some almond milk in it. I know you like it better that way.”

“Black coffee is fine,” Kaiba sniffs, and Mokuba says, “I know, but you like it better with milk.”

That night, in bed, he doesn’t think about anything but white sand and clear water off the Mediterranean. 

That morning, the next, he’s sitting in his office and he’s wearing white and blue, and in the perfect mahogany wood of the desk he sees himself through just one eye, fist balled up to hit him between the brows, once, twice, harder, and his eyes close and his throat relaxes and if he knew what the fuck he was feeling he’d call it agony. 

He knew Atem without ever knowing him. Sick and twisted a thought it is to have. But it doesn’t need an explanation. Atem believed in magic, and Kaiba in madness, and the pair together, intertwined as if a dance of red and gold and rust and half lidded eyes, pulled so near his chest he feels a second heartbeat, and the pair together intertwined is just exactly what gave life to Atem in Domino, Japan, seeing through the eyes of a mousy high schooler as the world around them crumbled. That’s sort of what teamwork might be like to him.

He isn’t going to cry for someone that never even bothered to tell him goodbye. Perhaps if he had, maybe then Kaiba would burn with the rage enough to weep for Atem, but he isn’t going to cry for someone that never said goodbye. Because if he’d said goodbye, it’d mean he wasn’t sitting on that gilded throne right now, waiting, watching through the glass of another life for Kaiba to make his next move. The Pharaoh didn’t leave him. He invited him along. 

In his bed that night, he knows just exactly what's got to happen next. 


End file.
